If you only listen to one song tonight, make it “Slow Crush” by White Cascade (2012, from the EP2 EP).
White Cascade is a shoegaze-y trio from Raleigh, North Carolina. I know very little about them. I had never heard of them until the other night when I saw them open for Ringo Deathstarr. I was really impressed by the White Cascade set, and learned afterward that the show that night would be their last show for a while. They’re going to shift their focus to making an album. The Ringo Deathstarr set, by the way, was incredible.
While the band has some pretty varied interests and influences, most of the stuff that’s pretty obvious is from the likes of other shoegaze bands. My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Swervedriver, Slowdive, etc. Before they started playing, I overheard a guy in the bar telling the kids from Ringo Deathstarr that “White Cascade sounds like Slowdive”. I would say that they sound like a band that likes Slowdive, but I wouldn’t say that they sound “like Slowdive”. If I had to choose one of the shoegaze-y bands to say that they “sound like”, I would actually say that they reminded me more of Catherine Wheel. Tonight’s song isn’t necessarily the best example of how they reminded me of Catherine Wheel, so you might have to just trust me on that.
Anyway, here’s tonight’s song:
“Slow Crush” by White Cascade
There’s a ton of fuzz and a ton of other effects. The vocals are run through some crazy effect to make them sort of ghost-like. And it’s not just this song. On most of the songs that I can remember them playing, it was the same story with the vocals. They’re so heavily affected that it’s impossible to understand the lyrics. The layer of thick, dirty gauze sort of makes it tough to tell the difference between the guitar effects and the vocal effects.
This is the kind of production that I really like. The noise and gauze serve a bigger function that simply being noisy and gauzy.
You can go to the White Cascade bandcamp page to download EP2, which also exists in cassette tape format.
this is that song 
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